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by JdeBP 981 days ago
Actually, it's that question that is the straw man. jstanley's point is that to the reader "posted last week" could mean almost no time at all ago. It's not about the display library choosing to label recent things as this. It's about humans reading such a label and not receiving the intended information, because humans don't cut off what they understand "last week" to mean at some arbitrary 12-hours-ago mark.
1 comments

Except they do get the intended information. The label doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the user would have seen other examples showing the specificity at intervals other than “last week” which sensitizes them to the cutoff points.

This is literally a non-problem. If a library behaved in the way the parent commenter makes them seem like, then, sure, they have a point. But they don’t. Something that occurred a second ago would say “a second ago”. Something that occurred 5 minutes and 43 seconds ago would say “6 minutes ago”, etc. There is no library in the world which takes a timestamp a second ago and outputs “a week ago” and pretending like there is is, literally, a strawman.

> the user would have seen other examples

Yeah, I've seen enough examples to know that no 2 websites implement the same logic so I shouldn't try to second-guess anything more than what the text literally says.